Various kinds of electronic control units (ECU) for various kinds of control, such as powertrain control, body control, and vehicle control, are mounted on a vehicle, such as a passenger car. In addition, an operation data recorder (ODR) is sometimes mounted on the vehicle to record various operating situations of the vehicle. Various kinds of vehicle-related information (will be hereinafter referred to as “vehicle information”) collected from these on-vehicle devices are useful for diagnosis of vehicle failure, or maintenance of the vehicle.
The vehicle information is accumulated, analyzed, and processed in an external device such as a center device. To allow the center device to get the vehicle information, it is necessary to write the vehicle information into a memory device (e.g., a USB memory), connect the USB memory to a PC, and transmit the vehicle information to the center device via the Internet. This imposes a significant inconvenience. To eliminate such inconvenience, it has been known that an exclusive communication module or cellular phone for bidirectional communication is used to transmit diagnostic information of a traveling vehicle to a center device (see, e.g., Patent Document 1).